City of Gainesville Permit Locator

City of Gainesville Permit Locator

One of our Code for Gainesville projects, the Permit Locator is a smaller piece of a larger project that aims to bring city services to citizens in an easy-to-use and accessible platform called the Business Portal. This site helps those looking to start a business to find the appropriate permits they need to fill out and submit, then puts users in touch with someone from the city's Department of Doing to help them with the next steps in the process.

Problem

The city's permitting process was definitely in need of a redesign; if you wanted to start a business there was a single person you had to meet with. All permits were housed in large binders that had been in use since the 70s. The process was slow, analog and cumbersome.

Process

The Code for Gainesville team worked with the City of Gainesville to digitize the permitting process, creating a large data repository of business types and their required forms. The interface was designed with consideration of the future user flow that this standalone site will eventually be a step of. Research was conducted to look at other business portals for city governments, and we took feature cues from existing products and resources.

Results

The final site design presents a lot of data and information in an easy-to-digest format. Users can easily move through the steps in order to locate permits and book an appointment with the Department of Doing.